Happy Thanksgiving
Posted on November 23, 2006
Filed Under America, Outside Ireland, Rant, Spring, bureaucracy, holiday, legal, not funny, travel | Comments Off
An American client of mine wrote me an email this week in which he effectively said, please, please bill me for as much money as possible before Christmas. Then, about 5 minutes later, he wrote another email with a megabucks purchase order for next year and we haven’t even finished started this year’s work yet! To be honest, a little tear escaped from my eye. There will be lots of tears if we don’t finish this year’s work within (gulp) three weeks.
He works in an industry where money is no object and they’ll pay whatever you ask as long as you deliver on time. In my last job, I did a deal with another American company where our profit was so outrageous that the board of my company actually considered whether it was legal to charge so much. They didn’t, of course, consider the morality of it!
I’m going to meet him and his team in New York next year, probably in March/April. Well, it would be impolite not to! I’m really looking forward to it because even though I’ve lived, and travelled widely, in America, I’m never visited New York. I’m not a big fan of big Government and Bush’s government is a bit scary now with their homeland security etc. Thankfully, the register reports that people are finally standing up to them.
Hands off our bank data, Europe tells US by Mark Ballard
The European Commission is set to call for an immediate halt on the illegal transfer of financial information to the United States Treasury.
A draft final opinion obtained by The Register concludes that central banks and local financial institutions that used the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) financial network had acted illegally in allowing data about their clients’ financial transacions to be transfered to the Treasury. The US started issuing subpoenas in the course of anti-terrorist investigations within weeks of the September 11 attacks of 2001 – the financial institutions and their messaging network hid the disclosures from citizens…
EFF sues US over passenger data by OUT-LAW.com
The US Government faces a lawsuit demanding information about the controversial programme which forces airlines to disclose information about European travellers to the US.
The suit follows the Government’s apparent refusal to give up information following a freedom of information request.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the digital rights group, has filed the case against the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The suit demands that the DHS release records about how collected data is handled, maintained, used, disclosed and secured…
And about time too. I’m what they call an independent traveller and I resent having to fill out forms telling some s’curity guard with a cap exactly where I’m going, where I’m staying and what I eat for my dinner. I’m a tourist, for gawd’s sake. I will spend loadsa Ben Franklin’s in your country on crappy t-shirts and keep those minimum-wage ner-do-wells in a Disneyland job and outta your social security system.
Sheesh, go figure!
